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This article engages with contemporary debates about debt and money from the vantage point of an ethnographic study of unregulated, small-scale moneylending business who continues to operate in the township of Soweto's poorer neighbourhoods. Following Peebles' argument that reading poor people's unwillingness to bank with formal institutions as a sign of ignorance is unwarranted, this article describes persistent dynamics of underground credit markets and personalized credit relationships, demonstrating how the practice of ukumashonisa (extending cash money as credit) by neighbourhood lenders are embedded in social fields shared by lenders and borrowers. This article further demonstrates how the vilification of the figure of the township moneylender (mashonisa) by a broad coalition of civil society groups, trade unions, the state and commercial financial institutions, assisted in the financialization of poor people's monies. This public consensus about the depravity of the neighbourhood moneylender is not shared by all Sowetans, especially poor and unemployed Sowetans who have been pushed into a greater dependency on both money and intense personalized social relationships as they try to survive. Seeking out personalized credit relationships, and turning debt transactions, contracts and relationships with local moneylenders into exchanges that take on the appearance of gifts rather than commodity exchanges, continues to remain a strategy for people who are no longer able to count on stable wage work as their primary source of income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political character of debt relations, focusing in particular on the increasingly important phenomenon of personal indebtedness. Following Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, it distinguishes between three forms of 'rationality' that explain the various power dynamics at play beneath the formal and seemingly voluntary loan contract. Debt first exemplifies the open-ended flows of power that circulate in the networked structures of the 'societies of control' described by Deleuze. Far from signaling the demise of the modern disciplines analyzed by Foucault, credit relations are, on the contrary, shown to depend on some of the normalizing procedures that constituted the common core of disciplinary institutions. Arguing for a synchronic approach to historical political rationalities, this article highlights the relationship between debt and sovereignty, showing the intrication of contemporary, financialized forms of capitalist exploitation and the state's ancient pretension to exact from its citizens an infinite debt of existence. Debt thus combines the respective effects of control, discipline and sovereignty and constitutes as such a powerful technology for the governing of individuals and populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concerns of this article are twofold: first, it examines the nature of debt as a social and economic force that fosters conditions of alienation in persons and institutions. Debt is also considered ontologically to be pertinent to the institution of the family as well as general conditions of kinship, of what determines what is ancestral and what is foreign. Second, it examines the conditions of financial and cultural crisis in Greece in recent years, where debt emerges as a prominent force that works not only at a geopolitical level but on the micro level of society as well. This inquiry is conducted primarily through an elaboration of key instances in recent Greek cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a case of artistic debt towards the end of the 17th century in the Netherlands and more particularly in the city of Dordrecht. Arent de Gelder, Rembrandt's allegedly most faithful pupil, continued to pursue the – by this time – unfashionable manner of his teacher. Shortly before, Rembrandt had to face a heavy artistic and financial crisis. De Gelder's debt was not only that of a mere pupil. His own social and financial independence fully allowed him to explore and experiment with the Rembrandtian manner, even in more radical ways than Rembrandt himself. In Dordrecht, De Gelder moved in a social milieu that still cherished the Rembrandtian manner. Former Rembrandt pupils, many of whom came from Dordrecht, had already successfully chosen other artistic paths, as the new taste of the Dutch elite evolved in favor of a grander, more 'aristocratic' habitus and hence manner, that greatly differed from Rembrandt's. This article focuses on this both creative and contradictory nature of artistic debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2009, Greece has been hit by a severe economic recession followed by harsh austerity policies, gradual impoverishment, and ultimately social collapse. This article investigates the cultural landscape of the so-called 'Greek crisis', focusing on Athens, the nation's capital, and the ways the crisis discourse employs biopolitical technologies of dispossession and displacement in order to generate an intensified breed of body-politics. The article's main case study is documenta 14, a blockbuster exhibition of contemporary art organized in Athens in 2017, seemingly elaborating on the ideas of debt – classical and modern – though in fact promoting neoliberal approaches to public economy and life. The idea of 'classical debt', the article concludes, continuously reiterated by both Greece's defenders as well as its most unforgiving critics, rather than acting as an emancipatory force, ends up producing a public consisting of silent bodies, trapped in highly romanticized discourses of the past and ultimately unable to defend themselves. This tension, however, also provokes narratives and gestures made of contradictions and ambiguity, difficult to map and monitor according to established research protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the interrelation of two forms of debt – financial debt and the symbolic debt to the past – in order to propose a rethinking of the discourse of debt through the 'middle voice', understood both as a grammatical category and, more generally, as an expressive modality that can take shape through different media. Can we revisit discourses of debt through 'grammars' that could restore a form of agency to the 'indebted subject' and disrupt the asymmetrical power relation between debtor and creditor? To explore this question, the article turns to literary and artistic responses to the discourse of debt against the backdrop of the Greek debt crisis. Through a close reading of the novella Close to the Belly (2014) by Sotiris Dimitriou and an untitled art installation by Stefania Strouza (2011), it traces how these works cast the subject as produced by the discourse of debt and test alternative conceptions of the indebted subject through the modality of the middle voice. Dimitriou's novella tries to transcend both the moral discourse of financial debt and the debt to the past by envisioning a disengagement from all debt, which eventually yields a society without past and future. By contrast, Strouza's installation reconfigures the debtor-creditor relation without renouncing debt altogether. By staging an encounter between Sophocles' Antigone and Marx's Capital, it transforms the power relation of debtor and creditor into a deictic exchange that makes these positions malleable and reversible. Through these works, the article explores the conditions for reconsidering the notion of debt through the modality of the middle voice and the risks but also the politically promising possibilities the middle voice opens up for conceiving the indebted subject and the temporality of debt otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]